He goes on to tour what science currently claims to know about human nature, including its cognitive, intuitive and emotional faculties, and shows what light this research can shed on such thorny topics as gender inequality, child-rearing and modern art. What might amaze is the persistent, often vitriolic resistance to these findings Pinker presents and systematically takes apart, decrying the hold of the "blank slate" and other orthodoxies on intellectual life. For those who have been following the sciences in question-including cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology-much of the evidence will be familiar, yet Pinker's clear and witty presentation, complete with comic strips and allusions to writers from Woody Allen to Emily Dickinson, keeps the material fresh. Drawing on decades of research in the "sciences of human nature," Pinker, a chaired professor of psychology at MIT, attacks the notion that an infant's mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and individual variation. This book returns to that still-controversial territory in order to shore it up in the public sphere.
Made a case for evolutionary psychology-or the view that human beings have a hard-wired nature that evolved over time. In his last outing, How the Mind Works, the author of the well-received The Language Instinct
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